


about the mirror and its pieces

by Siria



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-04
Updated: 2013-10-04
Packaged: 2017-12-28 07:54:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/989614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This wasn't how Stiles had expected to spend his Spring Break.</p>
            </blockquote>





	about the mirror and its pieces

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Sheafrotherdon for patient beta reading!

"Just so you know," Stiles said, scrambling backwards, crab-like, over the floorboards, "I'm objecting to all of this on principle."

His room-mate was living it up on South Padre Island, Allison and Scott were off in Paris, doing something as close to canoodling as was possible for two people to get without developing adult-onset diabetes, and here Stiles was: spending Spring Break of his senior year back in Beacon Hills, trying to get out of the way while Lydia and Derek dealt with the latest creepy-ass thing to strike the town. 

Stiles had no idea what the hell the thing was—it moved in a kind of flicker-fast stop-motion, and the only impression Stiles could glean was of too many arms with too many joints, all reaching out and trying to reel them in. It was a little like being attacked by a Tim Burton movie, only instead of exuding a sense of vaguely Gothic whimsy the thing trailed a burnt ozone scent behind it. Stiles hadn't felt his skin crawl from mere proximity to something since he'd been near the Darach. 

"Shut up, Stiles," Lydia and Derek said in unison, and frankly it was eerie how well the two of them had learned to work together. Derek had teeth and claws and Lydia's voice was just as sharp; Derek feinted left and Lydia moved right, palming a knife out of her jacket sleeve as she did so and sliding it across what must have been the thing's throat in one fluid movement. 

It let out a screech to rival anything Lydia was capable of, the pitch of it enough to raise the hairs on the back of Stiles' neck, and it made one last attempt to reach out and trap Derek in the embrace of its too many arms. Derek roared at it, raking it across the body with his claws, and the creature toppled backwards. It landed square in the middle of one of the few salvageable pieces of furniture which had been hauled up to the top floor of the Hale house, smashing the heavy mahogany dressing table and sending pieces of mirrored glass flying in all directions. Some of them peppered Derek's face and arms, drawing blood and snarls in equal measure. The creature jerked and screamed again, and then lay still.

Lydia nudged the thing's body with the tip of her boot to make sure it was dead, before snapping pictures of it from several angles with her iPhone. "If I'm going to do a digital edition of the bestiary," she said when Stiles squinted at her, "I'm going to make sure it's illustrated with something more useful than medieval stick figures."

None of this was how Stiles had hoped to mark his last-gasp chance at experiencing some full-on undergraduate hedonism, and he pointed out as much as he helped heave the thing down the stairs, around the destruction it had caused when it had chased them upstairs in the first place, and outside. Derek carried it by the shoulders, Stiles by something that was almost definitely, probably, hopefully a leg. "Not to mention that I'm way too young to be spending my vacation time wallowing in nostalgia," Stiles concluded, dousing the creature in lighter fluid and taking a hasty step back as Lydia struck a match. 

"Nostalgia?" Derek said, raising an eyebrow as the thing caught fire. It smelled like burned hair and crumpled in on itself surprisingly quickly, as if it had been made of nothing more substantial than cardboard instead of sinew and bone. 

"Well, come on," Stiles said, gesturing between them, "what says high school like running around in the woods with the two of you punching out the forces of creepy, venom-dripping evil while I help figure things out using my awesome research skills and sheer brainpower?"

Lydia shot him a look which would have made lesser men quail, and who was Stiles kidding, totally the lesser man here. "Okay, okay, we figure things out using your brainpower, my moxie."

Derek snorted.

"What!" Stiles said, spreading his arms wide. "I have moxie! I could totally have moxie!"

Debating the definition of the word moxie lasted the rest of the time it took to get rid of the corpse, and then the short walk for Stiles and Lydia back over to Stiles' jeep. Derek went back into the house without saying goodbye to them, which was a sad commentary on how his manners had reverted in the couple of months since Stiles had seen him last—they'd been making excellent progress on getting him house broken and okay, that was an analogy he never needed to vocalise anywhere near one of the werewolves, ever. It was just that even for Derek, he'd been quiet since they'd first caught sight of the creature loping through the preserve.

But eh, Stiles thought as he put the jeep into gear and headed off down the rutted track back to the main road, he shouldn't be too hard on the guy. Even for Derek, today had been full of the whole running, jumping, climbing trees, yelling instructions, jumping-down-from-the-trees-that-the-wavy-arm-monster's-venom-had-felled shtick. Stuff like that was bound to take it out of an introvert. 

The drive back into town was mostly quiet; there were few other cars on the road before dawn, and nothing good on the radio, so Stiles drummed his fingers against the steering wheel in an attempt to distract himself from the impending adrenaline crash. Lydia was occupied with cleaning the creature's grey, viscous blood from her knife with a practiced, focused air which made Stiles a little impressed, a little nervous, and even a little turned on, despite the fact that the two of them hadn't been in any way involved since one really ill-advised bottle of Thanksgiving tequila a couple of years back. 

(Tequila and turkey, while alliterative, didn't make for a good taste combination, and certainly didn't enhance Stiles' hand-eye coordination.)

"You're getting pretty good at that," he told her as he took the exit that led to Lydia's subdivision. 

"Well, you know what they say about practice making perfect," Lydia said airily, sliding the knife back into its sheath. "And I was starting from a pretty high baseline."

"True, true," Stiles said, bobbing his head, because Lydia's parents may have bought her an Hermès handbag as a high school graduation gift, but she'd gifted herself the pleasure of finally and definitively kicking Peter Hale's skeezy ass into the afterlife. If the Argents' bestiary didn't have a page that said, in all caps, "Don't fuck with a banshee," Stiles would be very surprised—though then again, if they did, he'd be super impressed that someone had managed to translate that into Latin. "Also, what better place to keep your creepy-ass-kicking skills up to speed than at Stanford, I hear there are all kinds of—wait, that syntax can be somewhat ambiguous when spoken aloud, what I meant is that you are skilled at kicking the asses of those who are creepy, not that your skills are in _themselves_ cr—"

"Stiles," Lydia said, inspecting her cuticles, "still carrying a knife."

"Shutting up now," Stiles said, because hey, he was entirely capable of taking a point. Eventually. 

He dropped Lydia off back at her house, and as she slid out of the jeep, Stiles noticed that the place was entirely dark, not even a porch-light on, and the only car in the drive was Lydia's own little two-door electric. For the first time, Stiles thought to ask himself what Lydia was doing back here for Spring Break instead of lying on a beach in the Caribbean, drinking something paint-stripper strong from a coconut. He repressed the urge to beat his head off the steering wheel because Stiles had watched a lot of _Sesame Street_ as a kid—he should have empathy out the wazoo, if that was indeed a place that empathy emerged from. It was just that sometimes, it was too easy for Stiles to focus on his own anxieties, to forget that mundane things could make other people feel scared and lonely too. 

"Hey," he called after her, winding down the window, "what do you say we hit up Rick's for brunch tomorrow? Pancakes, waffles, a pig shall sacrifice itself bravely to bring us all the bacon in the land."

Lydia folded her arms. "You're asking me out to brunch?"

"Just a friend thing!" Stiles hurried to clarify. "Not a date, a friend brunch. Frunch! It's a thing. Could be a thing, whatever. We could get Derek to come too. No one loves maple syrup like that man loves maple syrup, it's an illness." 

Lydia made a face, the one that said that she was pretending to be annoyed but was secretly quite pleased to be asked. "Okay," she said after a moment's hesitation, "but you're not to show up a minute before eleven, or without caffeine."

"It's a frunch!" Stiles said, giving her a thumbs up, because several semesters of French lit, sociology and anthro hadn't made him any more adept at carrying on a conversation without embarrassing himself, no matter the cultural context.

He got home just as the sun was coming up, which gave him plenty of time to say hey before his dad headed out to work, which meant that once again Stiles got to be the only college student in California whose dad was disappointed that he wasn't just coming home from spending all night high at a kegger.

  


* * *

  


Stiles was outside Lydia's house at 11:03 the next morning, a triple black espresso ready for her while he savoured the sugary kick that came from coffee laced with every syrup the local coffee shop had in stock, topped with whipped cream. He'd claim to be surprised that the baristas there could still remember his order, given that it had been almost a year since he'd last been in the store, but even Stiles could only bluff so far—Scott had once taken a mouthful of Stiles' coffee by mistake and spat it halfway across the room, claiming that it tasted like pixies had barfed in his mouth. Stiles' order was _memorable_. 

"Ugh," Lydia said as she got into the jeep, "gimme," making impatient grabby hands until Stiles had handed over the coffee to her and she'd taken a healthy swallow. She relaxed back against her seat and closed her eyes in bliss, her fingers curled tight around the cardboard sleeve. "Thank god. My mom only has Folgers in the house, and just, no."

"Math majors demand a better class of caffeine delivery?" Stiles said as he pulled back out onto the street and headed east. 

"Pfft," Lydia said, "you've never seen the coffee pot outside my lab. But if it's going to be rotgut, it should be proper rotgut. Folgers is just insipid mediocrity. Go big or go home."

"You know," Stiles said thoughtfully, "I sometimes think Coach missed a trick not making you the lacrosse team captain."

"I am very ruthless," Lydia said serenely.

Rick's Diner was in Audubon, the next town over, and the road there led right past the preserve and the Hale house. Stiles figured he might as well swing by and double check if Derek wanted to come with them or not—he'd texted Derek that morning to invite him and had no response, which wasn't all that unusual where Derek was concerned. The guy talked a lot more now than he had when Stiles had first known him, but even an upgrade from 'Nolan-era Batman' to 'Burton-era Batman' on Ye Olde Gravel-Voiced Angstometer hadn't turned him into a world-class communicator. The very fact that Derek had installed Skype on his laptop so he could talk once a week with Cora when she moved to Boston for college could probably be classed as a minor miracle. 

(Or, you know, was attributable to the fact that Cora Hale could give a guy a dead arm like nobody's business, even if he was a werewolf. Whichever.)

Stiles normally would have taken the silence for a refusal, but there was always the chance that Derek hadn't seen the message—and a Derek Hale who'd unwittingly passed up on the chance to go to Rick's Diner was guaranteed to be a sad Derek Hale. Stiles hadn't been kidding about Derek's fondness for maple syrup—the guy could inhale his way through a stack of syrup-smothered waffles with a speed which was impressive even to Stiles, and had until very recently been a teenage boy. It never failed to make the waitresses cluck and bring more over to him. 

Better a werewolf in a carb coma, Stiles thought, than a grumpy one.

With most of the trees still mid-March bare, the roof of the house was soon visible, and then the great bulk of the building itself. It had been easy to miss, last night, between the darkness and the murderous escapee from the _Twilight Zone_ -episode, just how much effort Derek had put into fixing up the house over the past year. It was still far from fully habitable, but the scaffolding clustered around it spoke of a structure that had been made sound once more, to a frame that would soon support rebuilt bedrooms and bathrooms. Off to one side of the clearing there were palettes stacked high with lumber and shingles for the new roof. So far, so HGTV home reno, but there was one detail which stood out a little. 

"Huh," Stiles said, letting the jeep roll slowly to a halt a little way from the house. 

"What is it," Lydia said, eyes still closed, "and it better be good, because I haven't had any bacon yet and I've already filled my monster-killing quota for the week."

"Well," Stiles said, resting his forearms on the steering wheel and leaning forward to peer through the windscreen. "You're good at modelling statistical probabilities in your head, right?"

"Yup," Lydia said, drawing the word out and making it pop against her lips. 

"Okay, so. What's the probability that in northern California, at this altitude and this time of year, you're going to get a microclimate that's going to cause snow? Like, a really microclimate, as in snow that's falling in one very specific spot only so the Hale house looks like a very creepy snow globe?"

Lydia's eyes snapped open, and then she too was staring open-mouthed through the window. After a long moment she said, weakly, "I'm going to estimate that it's low."

"Scientifically speaking, I can call this creepy, right?" Stiles said, digging in his pocket for his phone. 

"Hell yes," Lydia said, knocking back the last of her coffee before stowing the empty cup away under her seat. 

Derek hadn't answered his text, and when Stiles tried to call him, the phone just rang out. The snow was still falling softly a couple of feet away, as neatly contained as a werewolf by a circle of mountain ash, and Stiles was totally channelling _Star Wars_ and having all sorts of very bad feelings about this. He wriggled in his seat, feeling pushed and pulled back and forth by all the things he _could_ do before deciding which was the most pressing. "We're going to have to go in there."

Lydia's body language, while more restrained than his, also spoke eloquently of 'do not want.' "Ugh," she said, flinging open the passenger door with more force than was strictly warranted. "Fine, we'll go in to check up on him, but I want to point out that acting in an ethical way _sucks_."

"Tell me about it," Stiles muttered as he followed her. 

He'd been half-expecting that there would be a magical barrier in place to stop them from getting closer to the house, or even just that he'd feel _something_ while crossing it, that faint electric tingle that he'd learned to interpret as the presence of an active spell. But there was nothing, just the snow crisp underfoot and the woods silent around them. They went up to the porch and let themselves in through the unlocked front door.

"Derek?" Lydia called. 

"You here, bro?" Stiles yelled, because if there was one thing sure to annoy Derek Hale out of hiding, it was Stiles calling him bro. But there was no answer, no sign of anyone as they made their way through the rest of the ground floor. What there was, however, Stiles realised, was more house than there should have been. Not that Stiles was an expert on construction or anything—his dad still twitched if reminded of the time Stiles had wielded hammer and nails in a valiant but ultimately doomed attempt to hang up a picture in his bedroom—but he wouldn't have thought that the contractors had gone much past the drywall stage yet. 

"Is it just me," he said, turning in a slow circle, "or is this all a little more _Homes and Garden_ -ready than I was expecting?"

"It's not just you," Lydia said, taking a half step closer to him.

The fire had left the front half of the house largely untouched except for smoke damage, but the flames had eaten up the back, where Stiles presumed the kitchen and dining room must once have been. The hallway that led past the main staircase should have ended abruptly, leading to nothing but a short, sharp drop into the basement. Now the floorboards were solid under their feet, and the further they walked, the more finished everything seemed. 

Stiles peered into one of the rooms which opened up off the hallway—some sort of family room, decorated like someone had just handed over their credit card to a sales assistant in Pottery Barn, with walls the bright blue of a Mediterranean sky. Stiles was baffled. "Is that fresh paint on the walls?" Why would one room be fixed up and finished when the rest of the house was still such a mess?

Lydia peered around him into the room. "Seems like it, but this doesn't look like Derek's style. I mean, nothing's painted the colour of misery and dry rot."

They kept going down the hallway and into the kitchen, a large room with scrubbed pine cabinets and a table at one end big enough to seat twelve people. This room, too, was enticing—like the kind of picture you saw in a catalogue, luring you in with the promise that maybe _your_ house could be like that, if only you had several thousand dollars to spare and you promised to forego liquids that would stain, forever and ever amen. It looked like the perfect family home, only without the family; in fact, the only sign of life came from the back door, which was slightly ajar, its hinges creaking in the breeze. It was the kind of thing that should have been innocuous but instead was all kinds of ominous.

Man, Stiles really hated omens.

"Derek?" Stiles yelled at the top of his lungs. "You in here?"

There was no answer, but the back door slowly, steadily swung open without anyone going near it. Oh, that couldn't be good.

Stiles and Lydia looked at one another. "Well, we're probably going to miss them serving brunch now anyway," he said, because he had a gut feeling that the only place they were going to find Derek lay through that door. 

"I'm genuinely starting to regret not just staying in my dorm room and drinking box wine for the week," Lydia said, but she sighed and gestured at the door, indicating that Stiles should lead the way. 

The door led onto a porch which itself looked out over the nature preserve—but where from the front door the falling snow had seemed restricted to a tight circle around the house, here the land was white as far as the eye could see. On the other side of the house some of the trees had started to show buds, but here all the trees were bare stripes of grey and black against the endless snow. The snow was unbroken but for a single set of footprints which led away from the house and vanished over a low ridge and into the woods. Everything was incredibly quiet, and when Stiles breathed in, he could feel the air bite sharp and sweet as mint at the back of his throat. 

"Holy crap," he said as a thought suddenly occurred to him, and oh this was potentially _greatness_ , weird greatness but greatness, "time to knock something off my bucket list, we're in fricking _Narnia_." Bring on Aslan and Mr Tumnus—Stiles had been waiting for this moment since he was seven.

Next to him, Lydia sighed. "Oh great," she said. " _Allegory_."

When they stepped down from the porch, the snow crunched loudly beneath their feet and the sky over their heads was an even steel grey that promised more to come. Stiles' breath hung in the air when he exhaled, but he didn't feel cold even though he was wearing just a thin jacket over a t-shirt and button-down.

"This isn't so bad, right?" Stiles said, "Nothing threatening about this at all," which was of course exactly the moment that the kitchen door slammed shut behind them. Stiles refused to confirm or deny if the sound made him jump and yelp. (It totally did.)

"I'm going to make Derek buy me a pair of Louboutins for this," Lydia said as they set off across the clearing and towards the ridgeline.

"Yeah," Stiles said, "see, I was just thinking that we could guilt him into buying us lunch."

Lydia snorted. "Please, he's a werewolf with a huge trust fund. You've got to set your sights higher."

They followed the footprints—a pair of boots with a heavy tread that definitely looked like something Derek would wear—up to the top of the ridge and then stopped and stared. Beyond it was nothing like the landscape that Stiles knew should be there, the terrain that he'd become so very familiar with on nights out running with the pack (fun, if exhausting) or running for his life (not fun, definitely exhausting). There were trees, but they thinned out as the slope descended, growing fewer and fewer, thinner and thinner, until there was nothing but the snow and that single, dogged line of footsteps.

So they walked, and talked, because there was nothing else to do but look at distant trees which seemed less and less like trees and more and more like someone's drawing of a tree, flat and black and inky against the grey sky. Stiles told Lydia about Berkeley, about his new room mate and making the final decision on a major and the place down the street that did the world's best hummus, hand to God; Lydia talked about her honors thesis, and how she was thinking of doing a medieval studies minor to help her with translating the full bestiary, and, tentatively, about a guy she was maybe thinking about dating.

It was the kind of conversation that Stiles could never have imagined having with Lydia a few years ago, one where he didn't feel like he had to perform and she wasn't choosing each phrase with an eye to protecting her social status. Hell, if he could go back in time to tell his younger self that Lydia Martin would one day confide in him that she felt nervous about someone, he was pretty sure that his younger self would choke to death on his own spit. Which, temporal paradox, Stiles wasn't even going to go there, the last time he'd tried to think too deeply about a temporal paradox he'd given himself a migraine bad enough that Derek had sighed and offered to take the pain of it if only Stiles would stop _whining_.

None of Stiles' friendships had turned out the way he'd expected them to back in the day, was what he was trying to say—whether it was listening with genuine interest to what Lydia had to say about medieval vernacular palaeography, or looking forward to sharing a meal with Derek Hale. Derek was never chatty on the infrequent occasions he came out with the group for a meal, or the even rarer occasions he went to a movie with them, but whatever he did say tended to be wry, or smart, or both. There was probably some deep psychological explanation for how getting rid of Peter and Gerard once and for all had unblocked something in Derek—restored his sense of humour, made him less likely to react blindly to things, more likely to think things through—but there was a reason why Stiles had only taken that one Intro to Psych course. (Well, also the fact that the TA royally hated him, but bygones.) Stiles just knew that this new Derek—not soft, exactly, but with fewer sharp corners to hurt yourself on—this guy was easier to hang around with. 

That was the guy that Stiles going to find.

  


* * *

  


The ground continued to slope gently downwards, and Stiles felt like they must have been walking for at least thirty minutes, but there was no sign that they were getting anywhere, and no sign of Derek. The trail of his footsteps just kept going, and going, and Stiles wondered how long Derek might have been out here, how long—

"How long have we been out here, exactly?" he asked Lydia. 

She looked at her wristwatch, then blinked. "I could tell you, but it looks like my watch is going backwards, so…"

"This is not at all reassuring," Stiles said. "Like, the opposite of reassuring? That's the place where I am right now."

"My place is not to be reassuring, Stiles," Lydia said. "My place is to keep track of whatever empirical evidence we manage to collect, and then awe you with my analysis of it. Admittedly, right now all I've got is that we should be somewhere in the Preserve, but we aren't, and at least one dimension isn't working like it should."

She was right, she really had the non-reassuring part down pat. 

"No one's noticed an increase in magical activity around here lately? Deaton, Ms Morrell…" Stiles gestured vaguely at Lydia, a flap of the hand that meant _or you_ , and which was as close as Lydia was going to let him come to discussing the whole banshee thing with her. Lydia hadn't yet reached the point of being able to commune or whatever with the fact that her family tree took a sharp twist into the supernatural about three generations back. Stiles had a suspicion that she found being a banshee sort of tacky.

Lydia shook her head. "I mean, there was that… thing last night, but it didn't look like it had the ability to do something like this."

"True." The creature had been all animal stink and low cunning—smart enough to come after them, but nowhere near clever enough to create something like this. "Which leaves us at someone unknown is doing something that started probably not so long ago, and is really powerful, and we don't know where Derek's gone or why."

"Pretty much," Lydia said. 

"I love these pep talks of ours," Stiles said. "I feel so pepped."

They walked a little longer, and then Stiles thought he could make out something against the horizon. "You see that?" he asked Lydia, squinting. 

"Yeah," she said, "I think it's more trees."

They were trees—the same too dark, too spindly things they'd left behind a while ago, only Stiles thought that they seemed to rush up sooner than Stiles and Lydia could possibly have reached them, as if this whole landscape had only a weak familiarity with the concepts of scale and perspective. They made Stiles uneasy, but the trail of Derek's footsteps led that way, and there was no way they were going to turn back now. After all, Stiles had practically made a career path out of following his friends into stupidly dangerous situations, ever since he and Scott decided to make it all the way to the mall by themselves in search of pop rocks back in third grade.

And yeah, maybe Stiles was jumping to conclusions—maybe this wasn't going to be dangerous at all, maybe this was a completely benevolent yet enigmatic spell designed to entice Derek out into a weird, barren snowscape—but he didn't think so, especially not when he saw what he did when they got closer to the stand of trees. 

"We've been going in circles?" Lydia said sharply, because there was the Hale House, sitting square and solid in the middle of the trees. Except…

"I don't think so," Stiles said slowly. 

The house they'd left behind had shown signs of construction, of stirring life, but this was the crumbling house that everyone in Beacon Hills had tacitly avoided for years, no teenager ever tempted to so much as tag it with a can of spray paint because of the smell of ash and charred wood that clung to the place. As they got closer to the building, Stiles got a whiff of that smell again, thick and cloying and mixed with something worse, something fresh and bright and metallic—the smell of blood. 

Stiles looked over at Lydia, who nodded at him wordlessly to show that she had picked up on it too, and lifted up the cuff of her sweater just enough for Stiles to see that she still had a wicked-looking knife in a sheath strapped to her forearm. Lydia Martin clearly liked to be prepared when heading out for waffles. And Stiles, you know, had his wit, which was almost as rapier sharp so he really didn't feel many qualms about letting Lydia take point as they carefully rounded the house. Whatever Stiles had been expecting to see, it wasn't the sight that greeted them when they reached the front—there was an oak tree standing there. No tree grew that close to the real house, but here one stood: tall and strong and completely incongruous, covered in leaves of such a bright green that they almost made Stiles' eyes hurt after so long walking through a monochrome landscape. 

It reeked of blood.

"So we've got, what, a magical agriculturalist on our hands?" Stiles said, standing a careful distance away from it. It was just a tree, but hey, so was the nemeton if you wanted to be technical about it. All these years later and Stiles was still twitchy about having a tree in the house at Christmas. 

"Sylviculture," Lydia said sharply, which told him that she was at least as freaked out as he was. Lydia didn't snap like that at him over minor things anymore—at least, not unless he'd done something really stupid, like last summer when he and Derek had gone after that feral cockatrice by themselves and both of Stiles' eyebrows had been singed off. Which, in retrospect, not the brightest idea either of them had ever had—even if their synchronisation on taking off the cockatrice's two heads had been pretty awesome, if Stiles said so himself—hence why Lydia had been all pissy with him even while digging out the first aid kit.

"Well, it's not like I'm planning to plant one of these myself," Stiles snapped back at her, but Lydia was ignoring him in favour of circling the tree, and then Stiles was forgetting all about their bickering when he saw how Lydia stopped and stared upwards and blanched—the only colour left on her face the red of her lipstick and the dark brown of her eyes, wide and fearful. 

"What, what is it?" Stiles hurried over to join her and then stopped still. Bile rose acid-rich in his throat, and he had to press the back of his hand against his mouth to stop himself from vomiting. Now he knew where the smell of blood had been coming from. 

There were heads on the tree—severed heads, maybe a dozen of them, their faces waxen, dangling from the branches by knots tied in their hair. Stiles had to look away as he tried to force his breathing back under his control, stave off the panic attack that threatened to drive him to his knees.

"Oh my god," he could hear Lydia whimpering under her breath, "oh my god."

After a long, shuddering movement, Stiles turned to look again at the tree—he had to make sure that one of those heads wasn't Derek's. "This is so gross," he mumbled to himself. 

"Well, that isn't very polite," came a voice. 

"What…" Stiles said, because he hadn't said anything, and that hadn't sounded like Lydia, and then he realised that one of the heads near the top of the tree had opened its eyes and was speaking to him. Was grinning, in fact, and… "Holy shit, Peter Hale?"

"Who else were you expecting to see hanging around here?" Peter said—Peter's _severed head_ and holy crap, Stiles was going to ask his dad to forget the new iPod and just get him a set of therapy sessions for Christmas—and there was really no answer Stiles had to a question that weird, so he just settled for gaping silently.

"I killed you," Lydia whispered. "I killed you, I know I did." She was trembling, and when Stiles reached out to take her hand, her grip was desperate and strong enough to make the bones in his hand grind together. He flinched, but didn't let go.

"Yes," Peter said, smirking, "and you did a pretty good job at it, I have to say. Nice clean cut, good wielding of a broadsword. If someone's going to kill me, then I appreciate them at least doing the job _right_."

"Peter, stop taunting the poor child." And that was another one of the heads a little further down the tree, blinking her eyes open as if just coming to after a long sleep. "That's unfair."

Peter rolled his eyes, but Stiles was going to take the time to ponder the guy's post-mortem dickishness later because he'd never seen this woman's face before, but her colouring, the set of her mouth—those were all familiar. "You're Talia Hale." Seeing Peter was one thing, but this was a whole different kind of weird, talking to the woman whose son still grieved her with silent ferocity. More than anything, Stiles felt awkward. He knew exactly the kind of absence she'd left behind in the world, for all that Derek hardly ever spoke about her, and it was such an oddly intimate thing to know about a complete stranger.

"Mr Stilinski," she said, gravely, and her eyes didn't change colour but everything about her spoke of an Alpha werewolf, of coiled and waiting power, regardless. "Ms Martin."

"Hey," Stiles said, and made a dorky, abortive little wave of his free hand at her—as if she were going to be able to wave back and he inwardly winced at himself. Good job, Stiles. Nicely done. Super sensitive.

"We're looking for Derek," Lydia said. "Where is he?"

"He's not here," Talia said.

"Okay," Stiles said, "I mean, not to belittle your whole situation or whatever, but: _duh_."

"He's in danger, isn't he?" Lydia persisted. 

"Some decisions are going to be made," Talia said. 

"Wow," Stiles said, rocking back on his heels. "That's informative. You and Deaton work on the whole enigmatic, non-informative informing thing together? Because fair warning, that gets super old super quick."

"Alan always did have his own particular style," Talia said warmly. 

Stiles was listening to a severed head wax nostalgic about the local vet. All he'd wanted this morning was some _pancakes_. 

"But is he going to be hurt?" Stiles said.

"It's a bit late for that," Talia said. 

Stiles squinted at her. "Do you mean that in a generic, oh-his-werewolf-angst sort of way, or in a—"

One of the other heads yawned and blinked awake—an older woman with sunken cheeks and deep brown eyes. "If a mirror can show your face when it's whole, what can it do when it's shattered?"

"Riddles?" Lydia said in a voice of utter disgust. 

"What else, my dear?" the old woman said. Stiles wondered if she was one of Derek's grandmothers—he'd mentioned his father's mother once or twice, usually when Cora was around, but never his other grandmother; the only thing that Stiles knew about her was that she'd died in the fire. "We're here to be symbolic, after all, and you can't be properly symbolic without a riddle or two."

"This afterlife sucks," Peter said to no one in particular.

"You shut up," Stiles told him, before letting go of Lydia's hand in order to point at her. "She took a sledgehammer to your skeleton before, you think she couldn't go all Sarah Connor on your ass again?"

" _Thank_ you, Stiles," Lydia said, sounding genuinely touched.

"You're welcome," Stiles said, waving his hands at the heads on the tree—more of whom were stirring now, eyelashes fluttering and slack mouths twitching—and continuing, "But seriously, Derek: alive, okay, in need of our help, doing his thing without us? Help us out here."

"We are wisdom," the old woman said.

"And memory," said a middle-aged man with smooth brown skin and a shaved head. 

"We are a warning," said a teenage boy who looked barely older than Stiles, tow-headed and freckle-faced. 

"Yeah, this isn't so helpful," Lydia said. "Could we get a response that contains some empirical information?"

"We can help you only so much," Talia answered. "We're not here to teach you."

"But someone put you here," Stiles said. "I mean, you clearly didn't… You know." He mimed walking using two of his fingers.

"A basic logical inference," Peter said. "And who said the Stilinski kid would never learn how to focus?"

"Be quiet, little brother," Talia said, her voice all low command, and hoo, yeah, that was where Derek had gotten it from. Peter dropped his eyes as if metaphorically speaking—and oh yes, Stiles was going to go there because Peter was a dick—as if he had his tail between his legs. "Yes. Someone placed us here."

"And you can't tell us why?"

"Do you know how to try?" said Talia. 

"Do you know how to ask?" said the old woman. 

"Do you know how to sacrifice?" said Peter, and his grin was feral. 

"Whoa," Stiles said, at the same time that Lydia said, "What?"

"We've been here for nine nights," said Talia. "And the wisest do not know from where the roots of this tree spring, save only that they drink from memory and grow towards knowledge."

Stiles risked a glance over at Lydia, but she looked just as confused as he did. 

"Seek the mirror," said the old woman. "Follow his footsteps."

"Look." Stiles hadn't felt so frustrated since the last time he'd caught his dad sneaking out of the local McDonald's with a greasy paper sack full of burgers. "You don't seem like you're… great, you're not going to say anything else, are you?"

The heads had clearly decided that they'd reached their quota of semi-mystical mumbo-jumbo for the day—eyes and mouths all closed and soon they were once more what they'd been when Lydia and Stiles had first approached the tree, a horrible parody of sleep.

"Well," Stiles said, after a moment's silence, "that was horribly disturbing and almost completely uninformative."

"So it's really fitting for something to do with Derek Hale, then," Lydia said tartly. 

"Hey, that's…" Stiles bobbed his head from side to side in acknowledgement. "Not entirely untrue, but I would argue that it's much more characteristic of Derek Hale: The Early Years. You know, when he was all grr and argh on a semi-permanent basis, as opposed to now when he… takes more of a hobbyist approach."

Lydia shot him a weird look before turning and heading off across the clearing, following the line of Derek's footprints. 

"What?" Stiles said, spreading his arms wide, before hurrying to catch up with her. "He hasn't even been accused of murder in years!"

"You really do have a questionable taste in friends."

"No way," Stiles said without having to pause to think about it, bumping arms lightly with her, "because you're my friend, right?"

This time, the look Lydia gave him was warmer, but there was still that faint undercurrent of distance, of consideration, the kind of look Lydia got sometimes when that brain of hers was gnawing away at a problem it couldn't quite figure out. "There is that," she said, and elbowed him back before marching on across the snow. 

Derek's footsteps led up a slope this time, away from the house and the tree and the sleeping heads. Stiles didn't look back over his shoulder to see how long it took for them to disappear over the horizon. He wasn't sure he'd like what he saw, and so instead he tried his best to focus on the crunch of snow beneath their feet, the grey clouds scudding across the sky overhead blown by some wind that Stiles couldn't feel, the sound of Lydia's voice as she tried to work through what was going on.

"We know that something either took Derek or lured him away, sometime after we last saw him yesterday," Lydia said, ticking points off on her fingers as she went. "That something is definitely supernatural, and capable of working magic of a kind I haven't seen before. The magic is centred on some combination of Derek, the house, and or his family."

"Memory," Stiles added. "The… the others, they talked about memory, and warnings, and sacrifice. Something about Derek being hurt."

"Right," Lydia said. "And finding things out—Mrs Hale spoke about the tree growing towards knowledge." She gazed off at the horizon for a long moment, eyes narrowed in thought before she said, "And a mirror."

"Huh?"

"That's what that old woman said—that we had to look for a mirror, and think about what it can show… hrm. She wasn't very specific about whom it would show what."

"Okay, so I have no problems with admitting right now that I'm totally lost," Stiles said. "I mean, yay for the gift of footprints to follow, which is definitely one step up from your common-or-garden breadcrumb trail, but—"

Lydia held up a hand, cutting him off. "Yesterday, the creature, it fell into that old dresser just before we killed it, right?"

Stiles squinted at her. "Have you ever considered a membership in the Non Sequitur of the Month Club? Because—"

Lydia clapped her hand over his mouth, hard enough to sting. "Nod for yes, shake for no, or I will scream at you. Got it?"

Stiles nodded, wide-eyed, because he'd been close to Lydia exactly once before when she'd unleashed a full-on banshee scream and it wasn't an experience he or his eardrums particularly cared to repeat. Sure, it _sounded_ cool in theory, but the reality of being close to a wailing banshee was somewhat of a let down—like the time he'd eaten a lot of cotton candy before going on that huge ride at Six Flags. Stiles had tried his best to wipe that particular experience from his memory, but his dad still had the photos in an album somewhere. Parental perfidy. 

"Do you remember the creature falling into the dresser?"

Stiles nodded. 

"And breaking the mirror?"

Stiles nodded again. 

"I was distracted so I didn't notice," she said. "Did any of the glass cut Derek?"

He had to think for a moment, but then Stiles nodded—it hadn't looked serious, but the glass had caught Derek along one arm and on the side of his face, and the cuts had been deep enough to draw blood.

"Okay," Lydia said, taking a hand away from his mouth. "That's something to work with at least."

"What, is vagueness catching right now?" Stiles snapped. Not being in on something that someone else knew was one of his pet hates. There was the obvious irritation of not having knowledge which could save him from, you know, a bloody and ignominious end, but in Stiles' mind it was one short step from feeling like he didn't get something to feeling like he was about to be the butt of the joke. Mmm, residual middle school trauma.

Lydia just snorted at him and took back off up the slope. Stiles would totally have given her another, much more pointed, piece of his mind about the unwarranted touching and the condescension, but in another few steps the slope flattened out and then fell away again beneath their feet, rolling away into a shallow valley. A river ran through it, a narrow, murky gash curving across the white snow; in the centre of the valley there was a stand of trees, and the Hale House, and Stiles had the terrible feeling that if he turned back around he'd see, at the far end of the other slope, the same trees, the same house. 

"Time to see what's behind door number two," Stiles said.

Just like before, it felt as if their approach to the house took less time than it should have, as if each step they took could be best measured in miles rather than inches. The sensation made Stiles feel dizzy, and he blamed that for how long it took him to notice the woman.

She was tall—probably even taller than Derek—and built like an MMA fighter, solid muscle in her arms and her legs. Stiles knew this because despite the snow on the ground, she was standing in the river, her skirts kirtled up between her legs and the water rushing around her calves. The woman didn't look up as they approached, just kept stooping over whatever it was she was doing, her long, dark braid of hair—as thick around as Stiles' wrist—falling over one shoulder and swaying to and fro in time with her movements.

Stiles looked to Lydia for guidance, but she shrugged before clearing her throat. "Hi there, we were wondering if you could help us. We're looking for someone—Derek Hale. Have you seen him?"

"About yea high," Stiles said, gesturing, because sometimes he really just couldn't help himself. "Pretty hot but you probably still noticed the eyebrows, makes with the fur sometimes, massive guilt complex, tendency to loom?"

Still the woman didn't look up—she was focusing intently on her task, and Stiles edged a little closer to see just what she was doing. Washing something, he realised—pummelling a dark bundle of cloth against the stones of the river bed, wringing the fabric so that the dirt and the blood ran out of it. When the woman pulled the bundle out of the water for a moment to peer at a stain more closely, Stiles recognised what it was.

"What the hell are you doing with Derek's clothes?" Stiles said, because holy shit, how did she have them? He recognised the jeans, the henley, even the stupid brightly striped socks that Scott had given Derek for Secret Santa last Christmas. Stiles had to take a step back, away. 

The woman looked up this time, but not at Stiles. "Little sister," she said to Lydia, "you come to quest where you should not."

Stiles saw Lydia's eyebrows shoot up, but she squared her shoulders and faced the woman steadily, for all that Lydia was dwarfed by her. "This isn't a quest," Lydia said, "it's just another battle." 

The woman grinned at that, as if Lydia had just told a really hilarious joke, and Stiles still had _no idea_ what was going on, which, okay, was maybe some kind of karmic retribution for him not telling Lydia what was going on during sophomore year of high school, but that didn't stop it from sucking immensely. "Is no one here capable of giving an upfront answer to _anything_?"

The woman whirled around and glared at him, icy water foaming around her calves, and okay, now Stiles was sort of regretting attracting her attention. "Your boy is impertinent." The woman's face was handsome but it was clearly not all there was to her. It didn't feel like a glamour, exactly, not the way that Jennifer Blake had used one to smooth over her scars and repair her ripped flesh. When Stiles looked at her, he got the impression of sharp claws and battle cries and the blue-green sheen of light against a raven's wing, of youth and maturity and impossible age, as if the woman existed in ways beyond the scope of Stiles' senses. He gulped and took a careful, deliberate step back behind Lydia. 

"I get that a lot," Lydia said, and Stiles had no idea how she was able to look so calm. Ten points to Slytherin, for real. "The thing is, my lady, that we haven't been here before so we're not very clear on the protocol, but we don't want to give offence. Could you tell us what is expected of us?"

The woman tilted her head and looked at them for a long moment. It was like being eyed by a predator that wasn't quite sure if it was hungry or not. Eventually she huffed and folded her arms and Stiles resisted the urge to sag in relief. 

"To ford this river," the woman said, "it is as it has always been. Answer me three questions, and I will answer you three in turn—but your answers must be honest, and they must be direct, or the next grave clothes I wash shall be your own."

Which, Stiles thought, wasn't intimidating at _all_.

  


* * *

  


Stiles and Lydia sat down on one of the low, flat rocks that lined the river bank. The woman waded out of the river to join them and let loose her red wool skirts so that they hung down to her ankles, seemingly her only concession to the snow—otherwise, she stood barefoot and with bare arms. She dropped the sodden pile of Derek's clothes beside her; wrinkled and dark on the ground, they looked like a shifter's cast-off skin. Stiles didn't think he'd been this agitated in advance of a test since his freshman year of college, when he, Allison and Derek had had to spend the night before his stats midterm—the night he should have spent, you know, studying and trying to sleep on an actual horizontal surface—up a tree trying to hide from a huge herd of particularly enraged pukwudgies.

(Those things had _really_ sharp teeth.)

But hey, this was for Derek's sake, not his. Stiles would be willing to actually go back and do that stats midterm again if it meant that he could get Derek safely out of here. Sure, no one had actually attacked them, or even threatened them really, but nothing about this place felt right. The sky overhead was too flat, too uniform, there was snow but it didn't feel cold, and that was even ignoring the fact that there was a tree back there that looked like a Christmas decoration designed by Charles Manson. Stiles tried to imagine what it must have felt like, for Derek to see that tree, to see his _family_ hanging there like a crop of obscene fruit, but his mind drew a welcome blank. As awful as it had been to see his mother lying cold and oddly small in her coffin the day of her funeral, Stiles had never had to face anything that horrific.

The woman folded her arms and studied them for a long moment, her eyes dark and shining and bird-bright, before she said, "Do you know how to try?"

Stiles was just about to say, "Hey, that's the same question the heads asked us!" when he felt Lydia's sharp, sharp fingernails dig into his forearm for a blindingly painful moment, and he closed his mouth with a snap. Right, honest answers, direct answers, okay. Okay, he could do this, and he ruthlessly suppressed the memory of his dad, angry and upset because he knew Stiles wasn't telling the truth but didn't know why, pushed to one side the thoughts of the last time he'd argued with Derek, when Derek had sneered at him and said, "I can hear your heart, Stiles, I know when you're lying to me."

Lydia spoke first. She explained about Jackson and the kanima, how he'd pushed her away and pulled her back and hurt her, and how she had kept trying regardless—because Jackson had been selfish, and self-centred, but he had been one of the few people in her life who hadn't idealised her or condescended to her. She'd never quite loved him, she knew that now, but the affection she'd had for him had been enough to keep her pushing. She looked steadily at the woman the whole time she spoke, but even if Lydia's gaze had wavered, the steadiness of her voice would have been enough to convince Stiles.

Then it was Stiles' turn. He couldn't quite hold the woman's gaze the way Lydia had, so he closed his eyes and fiddled with the fraying hem of his jacket while he spoke. "I—I'm good with it with some things, not so good with others. Part of it's the ADHD and part of it's just… I'm not always good at giving a shit, or sometimes I'll try to do something and it'll backfire because I didn't think things through the whole way." And that's true in a dozen different ways—it was all Stiles' fault that Scott had been bitten in the first place, and so many things would have been different if Stiles had decided not to be a short-sighted idiot that night, if he'd just stayed home. "But when it matters, when someone's important to me, yeah, I think I can." 

The memory occurred to him suddenly, unbidden, and he had no idea why that was the one that came to him first, but there it was—and softly, his eyes still closed, he spoke about spending two hours in a swimming pool with Derek, legs burning and arms aching, clothes a sodden, leaden weight pulling him down. It would have been easy just to let go, to leave Derek there, but Stiles hadn't, couldn't.

He had no idea how much of that the woman even understood—did supernatural and or quasi-mythical beings even understand what the hell a swimming pool was, let alone ADHD?—but when Stiles opened his eyes the woman was nodding as if satisfied. "Do you know how to ask?" the woman said. 

Lydia was again the first to begin. "I didn't find out what I am until I was in high school—it was my father's father's mother who was a… well, I suppose I don't have to explain to you how it skips over the men in a family, do I?"

The woman didn't say anything, just inclined her head, but Stiles would have sworn that there was a spark of amusement in her eyes. 

"And in the end," Lydia continued, "I only found out because someone told me what I am, but that was it. All she did was give me a name—I was the one who had to put meaning to it. I had to figure out what it meant, what I was capable of, and when Deaton wouldn't give me a straight answer I had to work out what questions would make Ms Morrell talk to me. And I did. I found it out, I researched what she told me, I had the single most productive semester abroad in Ireland ever. I'm inquisitive and I'm stubborn. That makes me an asset," she finished, lifting her chin. 

There was silence for a moment, except for the rush of the water over the rocks in the river bed, and then Stiles cleared his throat. He started to answer, started to say, "Yeah, duh, of course," because had the woman been paying attention at all? Of course Stiles knew how to talk, no one had been able to shut him up since he was a toddler—he'd had an elementary school teacher who'd actually tried to bribe him into silence with actual cash money, which hadn't worked, sadly; his younger self should really have had the foresight to build up a nest egg to pay his tuition—but he stopped himself. The woman wanted him to be honest, and the question had been if Stiles knew how to _ask_ , not if he knew how to talk. 

"No," Stiles said, tugging at his hair. "I'm pretty bad at it, actually. I mean, I'm trying, so you know, I get some participation points I suppose, but… all through high school I pestered my dad about his diet because I was too scared to ask him about mom, to say I didn't want him to leave me either. I was totally hot for Danny Māhealani for six really confusing months at the same time I still had a crush on Lydia and I couldn't ask either of them straight out because… because somehow it was easier to put Lydia on a pedestal and ask Danny dumb questions about whether he found me attractive because I knew they'd just roll their eyes at me and that was safer. I've never…" Stiles could feel tears of embarrassment pricking hot at the corners of his eyes, and he angrily swiped them away. "I go to visit my mom's grave all the time, and I've never worked up the courage to just ask her why she left me." He felt Lydia reach out to him again, but this time it was to rest her hand gently on his forearm, and he felt stupidly, pathetically grateful.

The woman passed no comment on this, either, just shifted so that her arms hung straight by her sides. "Do you know how to sacrifice?" 

Lydia shrugged. "I've given things up in order to get something in return. I don't sleep a lot during the semester—I've a double major and a double minor, I'm still planning to be done in four years and I want the grades to get a full ride to grad school. So I drink a lot of coffee, I invest in some high-end night creams, and I don't sleep a lot. I've done things for friends of mine that were…"

She looked up and caught Stiles' eye, and Stiles knew exactly what she was thinking of—the night of the rainstorm, the worst birthday Stiles had ever had. Stiles remembered lying on the ground, mud and rainwater soaking into his clothing, trying to get up and failing because of the way Peter's claws had raked across his leg, cutting deep down to the bone; remembered panicking because Danny was lying nearby, his breathing far too shallow for Stiles' liking, because on the other side of the clearing the wolves had been lying in a drugged and tangled heap, Derek standing over them, bruised and bleeding and clearly fighting off the effects of the wolfsbane, trying to protect his pack from his uncle as best he could. 

Stiles remembered struggling to lift himself from the ground and looking up to see Lydia and Ms Morrell advancing on Peter. And Stiles could do magic a little—hedge-witch stuff mostly, the kind that involved knowing the right kind of herbs for a poultice and the seven main uses for mountain ash—but even at his very best he knew he was never going to be more than a pretty weak conduit. Watching the two women walk through the rain that night though—that had taught him what it was like to be in the presence of a source of real power. Their magic lived in their blood, in their marrow, was a tangible thing that pooled and eddied in the palms of their hands, that they called to and coaxed before they flung it at Peter Hale. 

"….things that were drastic," Lydia finished. "And that had a cost. But as for sacrificing myself for someone else's benefit? Been there, almost done that once, thank you, and I'm never going to be in that position again. When I go, it's only and ever going to be on my terms."

The woman nodded at that, looking satisfied, and then arched one dark eyebrow at Stiles. 

"Yes," Stiles said without hesitation. He remembered the shock of the cold, how his whole body had flinched away from it but he'd had to force himself to keep going, to let himself be pushed under the water and the ice, because the alternative didn't bear thinking about. He couldn't have done anything else because it was his dad, it was Scott's mom, and screw whatever warning Deaton wanted to make about a darkness around his heart. Better around it than inside it. "I've already been to the tree," and he had no idea why he'd phrased it like that, or why it made the woman narrow her eyes.

She strode over and hunkered down in front of him. This close, Stiles could smell her—a rank, rich smell of sweat-soaked leather and old blood and wet soil—and he had to fight his instinct to rear back and away from her, could feel his heart-rate start to kick up. The woman pressed her palm flat against his chest and paused for a moment, head tilted, like a werewolf straining to make out a noise at the very threshold of its hearing.

After a while she nodded, satisfied, before standing up. This close, she towered over them, and Stiles had to crane his neck back in order to look at her. Holy shit, she was tall. It was a little like facing off with an Olympian swimmer, and idly Stiles wondered if a supernatural being had to work out to get shoulders like those or if they were something you were, like, incarnated with.

"You have answered three questions," the woman said, "and you have earned the right to ask three questions of me. You have my word that my answers will be honest and they will be direct."

"Okay," Stiles said slowly, because three questions wasn't really a whole lot when you get right down to it, not when you've got _who, what, when, where, why_ , and _no seriously, what the actual fuck_ , already running through your head. And those were just for starters. He hugged himself, looked pleadingly over at Lydia. She'd always been the better of the two of them when it came to the sneaky questioning side of things. He was going to let her take point on this one.

"Where will we find Derek?" Lydia said briskly, tossing her hair over one shoulder and okay, she was apparently going for the straightforward approach. Stiles wasn't going to quibble with her.

"Follow the wolf's trail," the woman said, pointing across the river, to where Stiles could just about see the trail Derek had left, leading off to one side of the silent, empty house. "Do not deviate from it. Do not turn back. He is already with the sisters, so you must hurry."

"And how will we help him?" Lydia continued.

"What he saw at the tree was a remembrance and a warning," the woman said. "You must be a reminder and a promise—that not everything he sees in the mirror is true. A decision will have to be made, and the sisters can be capricious. You can stand as his witnesses and his defenders."

Lydia nodded decisively, as if that had been at all informative, and stood up, brushing bits of dirt from her jeans. "Thank you for your help."

"Wait, I…," Stiles said, scrambling up as well and trying not to wince at how the rock's cold had seeped through his jeans and numbed his butt. Now was not the time to think about his Grandma Stilinski and all her strictures about how sitting on cold stone would give you haemorrhoids. "We have three questions, okay, we earned three questions so we should use all three of them. I have a question."

Lydia rolled her eyes but didn't try to stop him. 

Stiles looked up at the woman. "What will Derek need?"

The woman stared down at him as if he were some kind of exotic specimen that she couldn't quite categorise—which could have been intimidating but Stiles had been getting that kind of look from teachers since he started kindergarten, so whatever. Unless she had the same lung capacity as his fifth grade teacher, Mrs Marino—whom Stiles wouldn't have been at all surprised to find out was related to Lydia somehow—Stiles wasn't going to worry. 

"This answer is not part of my demesne," she said after a long pause. 

"Hey!" Stiles yelped. "You promised directness and honesty, dude, and I told you shit I've never told a therapist, okay, and that's not because my dad didn't try to make me go. C'mon, spill!" Dimly, he was aware that he was breathing a bit too hard, and that he'd jabbed a finger into the woman's (impressively firm) abdomen, but Stiles was pretty sure he'd hit his lifetime quota for seeing people he cared about suffer and die and he was only twenty-one. Anything that could help him help Derek, he was going to fight for it. 

The woman's eyes flashed and for a moment Stiles was really, really sure that he was going to end his life being smushed beneath the mighty fist of a warrior woman, but then she snorted and looked at Lydia. "He has not changed my mind about his impertinence."

"No," Lydia said. "I don't think he'll ever change. It's some kind of genetic mutation, I think."

"The wolf needs to know that there are those loyal to it," the woman said after a pause, "because it needs to be loyal in its turn. And there are things it will never ask for—you must be prepared to speak, and to ask, and to offer. That is all the answer I can give." She looked incredibly uncomfortable, and for once Stiles was really glad for the binding power of a mystical oath, because he didn't think she would ever have answered him otherwise.

"Thank you very much, my lady," Lydia said, and then took Stiles by the elbow, her nails digging in and making Stiles work very hard to repress a manly whimper. "We won't take up any more of your time." She nodded at the woman, and the woman nodded gravely back, before Lydia almost frog-marched Stiles across the river at a fording point a little ways up. Despite how shallow the water was there, it still soaked Stiles' pants right to the knee, and made his toes squelch damply within his socks. 

"So," Stiles said, as they started up the far slope. He risked a glance over his shoulder—the woman was still as a statue on the far side of the river, staring after them, her red dress like a bloodstain against the snow. "That was creepy and intense and sort of creepily intense all at once."

Lydia made a frustrated noise at the back of her throat, as intimidating as any sound Stiles had ever heard a werewolf make. "How well do you remember your SAT word definitions?"

"Stevedore: a dockworker employed in the loading and unloading of ships," Stiles said. "800 on the Critical Reading, high five!"

"Great. Define incorrigible for me," Lydia said sweetly. 

"Incapable of being corrected or refo—hey!"

"Do you have any idea," Lydia said through gritted teeth, "who that was?"

"A creepy woman with fantastic biceps and a penchant for doing household chores the old-fashioned way?"

"I'm pretty sure you just back-talked a goddess of war and death, dumbass."

Stiles gaped at her, tried to look back at the woman again but abandoned that idea when Lydia dug her nails in even more firmly and hustled them on up the slope at a faster pace. "No way! Seriously?"

"Why else did you think she called me 'little sister' when we met her?" 

"Honestly, I thought it was just like calling someone bro," Stiles said. "Like, a whole sisters before misters thing? Except a bit weird and supernatural."

"No, it was because she recognised that I'm a banshee," Lydia said, finally letting go of his arm, and Stiles couldn't remember her saying the word like that before—almost off-hand, like it was a simple statement of fact with no weight behind it, no connotations. "I've done a lot of reading on this, remember? There's one Celtic goddess in particular who's associated with banshees—the Morrigan—because she's often seen just before battles, washing the armour of warriors who are going to die. That makes them—us—similar. Sisters."

"Huh." Stiles took a moment to process all of that. "So you're essentially saying that I faced down an actual deity of blood and death, made her do my bidding and lived to tell the tale, huh?"

"Yes," Lydia said dryly, "that's exactly what I wanted you to take away from this."

Getting out of the valley was much more difficult than getting in had been. Derek's footprints, now bare, led up a slope and over places where loose scree showed through the snow. It made the going difficult, uncertain, and here and there Stiles had to look carefully to pick up the trail again—very carefully, he realised, because there were more than just Derek's footprints here. There were others, the same size and shape as Derek's, but they weren't _his_. 

"Lyds," he said, scrambling around one patch of very loose earth which was way too unstable for him to even attempt, not without him getting a sudden genetic transfusion of mountain goat, "I think someone's trying to confuse us, send us the wrong way."

"Well," Lydia said, grabbing hold of the sleeve of Stiles' jacket to steady herself as she clambered up and over a boulder, "she did specifically say we'd need to make sure we didn't deviate from Derek's path. Which means I should have expected this."

"Great," Stiles said, "this is a test? I hate pop quizzes."

On the other side of the boulder, the slope levelled out into a small plateau, where the snow lay heavier but far from untouched. In the middle of the plateau, there was a place where even Stiles, who was never exactly going to challenge Allison for the position of the pack's Tracker o' the Month, could see that the snow had been trampled. One set of footprints led over to the spot, but three distinct trails led away. 

"Ugh," Stiles said when they reached the spot. "This is worse than one of Harris's bonus questions." All three sets of footprints were identical—same length, same width, same imprint of long toes. All three went in different directions—one curving left, heading along the slope towards one end of the valley; one went straight up the valley's side, steep and straight; and one going right before veering sharply back down into the valley, near the direction from which they'd come. "So one of these leads us to Derek, and the other two lead us to, well…" He thought of the heads dangling, eyes closed and mouths slack, from the tree, and repressed a shudder. None of that, he told himself firmly. He took a moment to steady his breathing, in and out, in and out. Everything was going to be _fine_. Derek was going to be fine. 

"So we choose correctly," Lydia said, hunkering down to get a closer look.

Stiles waved his hands at her. "See, why do you say that like it's super easy, no big deal? Not all of us have competence and superpowers for… superpowers." He sighed, rolled his head backwards on his neck, wished briefly that he could kick his own butt for saying something that stupid, then crouched down beside her.

"C'mon," she said, " _look_. I know you've spent a lot more time wandering around the woods with Derek and Scott than I have. If anyone can do this, you can."

"Okay," Stiles said and took a deep breath. To the human eye, at least, there was no difference in the appearance of the footprints, and it wasn't like he could scent the air to see which way the real Derek had gone. But this wouldn't be a _test_ if it were impossible, and Stiles realised that Lydia had been very careful to phrase her questions in the future tense, making them definitive, predictive. Okay. He could do this, he—

Something clicked with him. He reached out and traced his fingers over one set of footprints, then the others, feeling the snow melt a little under his fingerprints. "This one," he said, deciding on the set which kept going straight up. "See how the other prints, they're all pressed the exact same depth into the snow, the whole way along the footprint? But these ones, there's a difference, like the way your weight shifts along your foot as you walk." Stiles was positive that this trail was Derek's. Sure, the guy was capable of moving with total stealth if he wanted to, and Stiles was actually pretty proud of himself that Derek's sudden appearances only occasionally made him startle nowadays. But silent or not, Derek always had weight, always had presence in the world around him—for better or worse, wherever Derek Hale went, he tended to leave behind a tangible mark of his presence. 

"Are you sure?" Lydia asked. 

"That's it." Stiles nodded to himself, then stood and looked up to the top of the rise, which looked further away than ever before. "That's the way."

  


* * *

  


By the time they made it to the top of the ridge, Stiles' palms were pockmarked with cuts and bits of gravel, and his leg muscles were aching from the effort. What had seemed a relatively low and gentle climb from the valley floor had become steadily steeper and steeper, and it was only the bone-deep stubbornness which was one of the cornerstones of the Stilinski gene that propelled Stiles to the top. When he and Lydia hauled themselves over the edge, Stiles lay there panting for a moment—just long enough for him to smell the smoke. 

He jerked his head up to see that they were on another plateau, this one longer, broader. The Hale House was here again, that same stand of dark, bare trees around it, but this house wasn't long abandoned, reeking of ashes—this one was ablaze. It should have been loud, the air should have been full of the hungry roar of the flames and the crackle and pop of dry timbers, but it was eerily quiet, like watching an old silent movie. 

Stiles heard Lydia whisper, "Oh my god," at the same time that he noticed the figure, still and naked and on its knees in front of the building—Derek.

"Shit," Stiles hissed, " _shit_ ," scrambling to his feet and running as fast as he could over the snow. He heard Lydia yelling at him, telling him to be careful, but Stiles didn't slow down, because the house was on fire and Derek wasn't alone.

There were three women standing at the edge of the tree line, watching Derek, watching the flames. They were identical: the same mass of dark, unbound hair; the same spattering of freckles across identical broad cheekbones. The only difference was that one of them wore green, another dark red, and the third sky blue. Their faces were expressionless, but maybe all that time Stiles had spent with werewolves was starting to rub off on him because he could practically smell their satisfaction. 

"Derek!" he yelled as he ran, " _Derek_ ," but Derek didn't move—just kept staring at the flames.

Stiles skidded to a messy halt beside him, snow soaking through the knees of his jeans as he took Derek by the shoulders and shook him. "Come on, snap out of it, it's not real. It's not _real_ , okay Derek? It's not really your house, they're just fucking with you."

Derek didn't so much as twitch. 

Lydia was there right after that, and part of Stiles' brain noticed how she angled herself so that she was between Stiles and Derek and the three silent, watching women. Most of him, however, was pretty busy engaging in an epic internal freak-out, because seeing this Derek was like looking a caricature of the kind of person Derek had been when Stiles first knew him—still and silent and always unable, one way or another, to turn away from his past. Stiles had wanted to find Derek, but not this Derek—this wasn't the guy who had, slowly and by painful degrees, become one of Stiles' best friends. This was like looking at a stranger all over again.

"We need to get him away from here," Lydia said, as if Stiles wasn't fucking _trying_.

"And how exactly do you think _that's_ going to work?" 

"Hrm," Lydia said, and then hauled off and punched Derek in the jaw, hard enough that Stiles' own face ached in sympathy.

"Holy shit," he said, because it _worked_ : Derek swayed, and blinked, and said, "What?" faintly, like someone coming to after a long sleep.

And then Stiles said, "Holy shit," again, this time far less enthusiastically, because the Creepy Clones were moving now, gliding across the snow with long, fluid steps.

"Little sister," said the one in the green dress, "you've damaged our sacrifice."

Lydia rolled her eyes and turned to face them. "Could you quit it with the melodramatic posturing and the epithets?"

All three tilted their heads in unison at that, and said, "We don't understand." It was one of the creepier things that Stiles had ever seen, and given the kind of shit he'd experienced, that they'd even made the long list was pretty impressive.

"He's not yours to take," Lydia said, folding her arms, and screw being the lacrosse team captain—sometimes Stiles thought that Lydia should have been the Alpha. "He's ours—our pack—and we've journeyed here to find him and reclaim him. We're taking him back."

The one in blue said, "We caught him fairly, according to all the old laws. Our pet could not have tracked him down if he had not been guilty."

"Guilty of what, exactly?" Stiles snapped. He stood, hauling Derek with him as he went, which wasn't the easiest thing in the world, given that Derek was almost two hundred pounds of groggy, naked werewolf and Stiles was trying to be very, very careful about where he put his hands.

"Blood crimes," said the one in red, and then her face flickered, reshaping itself so that for a moment, Stiles was looking at Kate Argent, six years dead and still with a sneer on her face; at a sweet-faced teenaged girl with long, dark hair; at Peter Hale. He felt the way Derek flinched next to him at each new face, as if the sight of each one were a physical blow. 

"Are you kidding me?" Stiles said. "You can't just—"

"Yes," said the one in blue, "we can. He bears the guilt of all these things; he feels it constantly. We can smell it on him. He is ours to take."

Stiles looked over at Derek and was horrified to see that he was crying—silently, terribly, tears streaming down his cheeks. "But he didn't—"

"Yes," Lydia interrupted. "He did."

Stiles jumped. "Lydia, what… you can't just let them…" His words stuttered to a halt; the two of them had walked for hours to find Derek, and now Lydia was just going to turn him over? He stared at her wide-eyed.

"I'm not _letting_ them do anything," Lydia said, turning back to the three women. "I'm aware of the things Derek's done. I'm also aware that you operate according to the old laws."

"Yes," said the one in green. "We took him cleanly and fairly. He is guilty, and so it is just for him to be called to be a sacrifice to us. You cannot deny his responsibility."

"I don't," Lydia said grimly. "I've met Peter Hale. But I rarely attribute to malice what I can chalk up to stupidity, so I've mostly forgiven Derek." She shrugged, before continuing in an oddly perky voice, "Plus, he's changed—did he tell you he's going back to school for his Master's in library science?"

Stiles had to admit that he was pretty confused by the twists this conversation was taking.

The one in red hissed at her. "Forgiveness is not our concern, nor is redemption—there is only justice, there is only the law."

"Exactly," Lydia said, and there was a note of triumph in her voice that made Stiles' heart do a little stutter-start of hope. "You ladies follow the rules. You're Vengeance and Justice and Retribution—you couldn't exist if there weren't rules for people to transgress. It's your nature to be bound by them, and you can't sacrifice something which has already been offered up."

There was a long pause, and then the one in green said, "Explain."

"Derek can be an idiot, and an asshole," Lydia said, "and he's way too apt to think of violence as the ultimate problem solving technique. But he's loyal—sometimes to a fault, hence the idiot part—and there's nothing he wouldn't do for his family. He gave up his status as an Alpha in order to save his sister's life, and it took him years to earn it back; he's been technically, legally, dead three times over these past few years, all in the attempt to save his pack."

"Four," Stiles interrupted, his voice feeling oddly hoarse. Having the heads of all three Creepy Clones whip around to look at him didn't exactly help with his performance anxiety there. "There was that time last July as well—you weren't here." Stiles still had nightmares about that sometimes—the boneless slink of the ghoul as it moved across the grass towards him, the way Derek had appeared and roared at Stiles to run, pushing Stiles behind him just before the ghoul had reached out and, unnaturally fast, snapped Derek's neck. On anyone else, an injury like that… Well. Stiles still had nightmares, sometimes. 

He was suddenly vividly aware of how Derek was standing next to him, how Stiles was helping to support some of his weight and could feel the heat of Derek's skin. It was a comfort, having Derek next to him, having proof that Derek was alive; sure, there was a big ole part of him that was all of a sudden clamouring with the need to freak out about something, but Stiles just didn't have the spare attention span to figure it out right then. Whatever it was could wait until they'd figured out a way to get rid of the revenge demons or whatever the hell they were.

"Which, I think," Lydia continued, her eyes widening in that artificial innocence she sometimes adopted when she really wanted to piss someone off, "gives us more than enough cause to establish that you have no jurisdiction over him. He belongs elsewhere, and he'll continue to atone elsewhere."

The three women exchanged silent looks, and Stiles was _pretty sure_ that if they'd been alone, the three would be rolling their eyes right now. Supernatural sarcasm was heady stuff.

"We adhere to the law," said the one in blue finally, sounding like someone had pissed all over her metaphorical Cheerios and then made her suck on a lemon. "You have made your case. We release your offering back to you, little sister."

Then they were gone, as suddenly and as completely as if they'd never been there—they didn't even leave any footprints behind them. And as soon as they were gone, the blazing house turned black and cold and crumpled in on itself so that all that was left was ash like a giant's thumbprint smudged against the snow. No need for the combo bait-and-torture thing any more, it seemed.

"That," Stiles said, because someone needed to break the silence and let's face it, he had a long and glorious track record of doing just that, "was like the most surreal legal drama I've ever seen. _Law and Order: Trial by Banshee_. That was so awesome. Someone needs to pitch this to Dick Wolf."

"If you make the noise," Lydia said, "I will kill you."

"Chung chung!" Stiles said, because he just couldn't help himself sometimes, but Lydia only smacked him upside the head so she couldn't have been _too_ annoyed.

He was interrupted from heading any further down that particular rabbit hole by the sound of Derek clearing his throat. "Thank you, Lydia," he croaked in a voice that sounded like he'd been breathing in smoke for a long, long time. "You didn't have to do that."

Lydia shrugged. "I know. I mean, I still think you're pretty awful sometimes. But you're our pretty awful, and my therapists have been very insistent that I've got issues about being possessive with things that belong to me."

There was a long pause, and then Derek said, "Okay."

"I've no idea if that exchange was emotionally healthy or not," Stiles said, "so I'm just going to say 'yay' and also 'we should get out of here' and call it a draw."

"I…" Derek looked over at the remains of the house-that-wasn't. "Okay," he said again. He still sounded not quite himself—the laconic thing, sure, but Stiles had never known him to be quite so compliant, so biddable. And Stiles was willing to give the guy a pass on a couple of things right now, what with the whole being abducted by supernatural deities who got off on being some kind of revenge posse, but he'd learned to be really wary when it came to sudden personality changes these past few years.

"Hey," he said, tugging gently on Derek's arm. "Are you okay?"

Derek turned to look at him directly for the first time, and Stiles let out a hiss. "The mirror."

"What?" Lydia said. 

"Look," Stiles said, turning Derek bodily so that Lydia could see it too, and yeah, that shouldn't have been possible—Derek shouldn't have been that pliant. Derek should have been digging his heels in, scowling at him, asking Stiles what the hell he thought he was doing, wanting to know where his pants had gone. But then again, Derek shouldn't have been willing to leave his house in the middle of the night, to walk and walk and walk past things straight out of his worst nightmares. "Remember what… that person told us about the pieces of the mirror?" he asked, refraining from saying "that old lady's head" because of how that old lady was quite possibly Derek's grandma and, you know. Manners.

"Oh my god," Lydia said, because there were tiny shards of mirrored glass that were just visible, dozens of them, embedded in the soft skin of Derek's forearm, along the high points of his cheekbones. They were the kind of minor annoyance that Derek's body should have rid itself of long ago, but they were still there—Stiles would bet had been there since last night, had been since the creature had fallen into the mirror. No wonder Derek had been so quiet when Stiles and Lydia were leaving—he'd probably been lured through the door before Stiles had reached the main road.

Stiles screwed his eyes shut as he fought to remember the old woman's exact words. "She said something like, if a mirror can show you what you look like when it's in one piece, what could it do if it was shattered?"

"She was trying to warn us about them," Lydia said. "I've never come across anything specifically like this before, but mirrors are powerful symbols in many mythologies—reflections, distortions, doorways. If any of the creature's blood got on the mirror…"

Stiles could see where she was going with this. "The pieces helped pull him in here, even without the creature to do it."

"Exactly," Lydia said. "Not to mention made it easier for them to make him want to… well. Give in." Lydia looked uncomfortable at that, and Stiles didn't feel much different. You didn't really associate Derek Hale with throwing in the towel easily; doing poorly thought-through stuff with the towel, sure, but… and Stiles' metaphor was getting away from him. He thought of Derek as they'd found him, on his knees and waiting and not even trying, and repressed a shiver. "We'll probably have to remove them if we want to get him out of here."

Stiles took a deep breath. "You're just going to have to hold still, dude, okay? I'm just going to take these out, not going to hurt you, so if you could maybe not wolf out and rend me limb from limb, that would be awesome." He took Derek by the wrist, held his arm up with one hand and very carefully started to ease the shards free, as gently as he could given that the only things he had to use as tweezers were his fingernails. 

It had to sting, at least a little, but Derek didn't snarl at Stiles—he didn't even flinch, just stood there watching Stiles' face as Stiles worked. It made Stiles a little nervous, honestly, to be so much the focus of Derek's steady gaze, those pale eyes fringed by dark lashes. Working on Derek's face was even worse, because Stiles had to step way into Derek's personal space for that. It felt weirdly intimate to be standing that close to Derek, especially given the fact that he was totally naked, and despite the fact that Lydia was standing right there and providing continued, pointed commentary on how Stiles could work with more precision. Stiles couldn't swear that he'd never had fantasies along these lines—Derek naked, Lydia giving orders, Stiles right there in the middle—but just like always when it came to life, the reality was so much weirder than anything Stiles could imagine.

Finally, Stiles pulled the last shard of glass free and tossed it away to get lost somewhere in the snow. The cuts scabbed over and healed and vanished, like they'd never been there in the first place, and then Derek blinked, like he was just noticing Stiles for the first time.

"All better?" Stiles asked. "We good?"

"We're good," Derek said, voice still hoarse, and Stiles was standing way too close to him for probably anyone's comfort, and he took a quick step back, and then another one.

"Super!" Stiles said, "Awesome!", and only resisted the urge to give a thumbs up by sticking his hands in his pockets.

"Well, if we're all in agreement on that," Lydia said, "how about we head home."

Stiles saw Derek glance over at the sad remains of the house. "Yeah," Derek said. "Home."

The walk back seemed to take a lot less time than the trip there had. Maybe it was because they were retracing three steps of footsteps instead of just one, but all the distances seemed smaller now, the valley sides less steep, the going easier. They forded the river, which now was little more than a stream; there was no sign of the Morrigan, no trace of the wet pile of Derek's clothes, so there went the hope of getting clothes for the guy any time soon. Stiles was trying to be gentlemanly but Lydia was being, well… Lydia about it.

"I just want some pants," Derek grumbled.

"Gee," Lydia said, all saccharine-sweet sarcasm, "does it suck, having to walk naked through the woods because of some bizarre and invasive werewolf magic? Cry me a river, Derek." She punched him in the arm, making Derek hiss and Stiles wince in sympathy before marching on ahead of them.

"She gave me a dead arm," Derek said, sounding outraged.

"I'm pretty sure she learned that from Cora," Stiles said thoughtfully. "We should never have let them hang out, ever. Total harbinger of the end times." 

They gave the first house and the tree a wide berth, though it was empty now, and when Stiles dared once to look back over his shoulder, he could have sworn that he saw the horizon inching ever closer towards them instead of receding into the distance. It was as if this whole world were collapsing in on itself, slowly but surely, having outlived its purpose.

And then there was the stand of trees around the house—the _real_ house—and Stiles didn't think he'd ever been so happy to see the Hale House before. 

"Do you think it's tacky to like, get down on my knees and kiss the porch?" Stiles said, as they climbed the steps and through the door and into something that was now much more active construction zone and much less a show house. No more kitchen, no more brightly painted walls, just drywall and plywood. "Hallelujah and thanks for deliverance and all that jazz?" Stiles hadn't been cold when they were outside, but now there was a definite early spring chill to the air and he pulled his jacket tighter around him.

Lydia looked at him with an expression which was pretty eloquent, probably in several languages, and shut the door behind them before turning the lock. Almost as soon as she'd done so, the door vanished like it had never been there. There was nothing to keep them safe, but there was nothing out there to keep outside—no snow on the ground at all.

  


* * *

  


Far less time had passed than it seemed like should have, but they were still going to be too late to make it to lunch, especially since Derek needed time to shower and dress. When he came back downstairs dressed in a pair of jeans and a soft-looking grey sweater, Lydia wasted no time in demanding curly fries in recompense for a wasted afternoon, which Stiles couldn't argue with. There was something about the springy quality of a curly fry that made it a very effective comfort food. Derek tagged along with them, though not before rolling his eyes when Stiles asked him to come, which Stiles figured that meant he was back to normal and was experiencing no more of the mind control mirror mojo.

Maybe it was a weird thing to be relieved about, but Stiles was kind of glad that Derek was back to being prickly and obstinate. Stiles _liked_ prickly and obstinate. On the way to the drive-through, Derek complained that it sounded like there were ball bearings rattling around in the engine of Stiles' jeep, and the whole thing should be sent to the scrapheap. Listening to him made Stiles grin, and when Derek frowned at him and asked him what he was so happy about, Stiles could only laugh. They bought a really disgusting amount of things covered in bacon bits and fake cheese and Lydia put away so many curly fries before Stiles dropped her back at her place that Stiles was pretty sure she must have a hollow leg.

"Don't take this the wrong way," she said, leaning in to kiss Stiles on the cheek before climbing down from the jeep, "but please don't call me for the rest of Spring Break, not unless there's a full-on zombie invasion in Beacon Hills."

"Lyds," Stiles told her seriously, saluting her, "if there was a zombie apocalypse, you know you'd be the first person I'd call."

Lydia dimpled at that, Derek scowled, and hey, the restoration of Beacon Hills' rightful world order or something. Yay team. 

Stiles drove Derek back to his place. It wasn't really that far from the subdivision where Lydia's parents' house was to the preserve—Derek could probably have run it in under twenty minutes—but Stiles was there and had nothing particular to do, and besides it felt sort of cruel to make the guy go back to that empty house by himself, after everything he'd seen that day, all the versions of the house that he'd been forced to look at, after all his attempts to turn the house back into a home.

Stiles pulled up in front of the house and cut the engine. "So," he said, "you'll be okay here, right?", which was possibly the stupidest question Stiles had said in a long time, because he was pretty if Derek said 'yes' it would be a lie and if he said 'no' it wasn't like Stiles was a trained therapist or anything. It was difficult enough living inside his own head most days, and it was hard enough to get a read on why Derek acted the way he did sometimes even without the added complication of the guy just having relived some of the most traumatic moments of his life.

Heads. On _trees_. Jesus.

"Thank you," Derek said, which wasn't exactly an answer for what Stiles had asked but hey, never let it be said that Stiles Stilinski was one to look a gift non sequitur in the mouth.

"You're welcome," Stiles said, drawing out the words, "though I don't really know what for—"

Derek turned and looked at him. That strange, vague absence he'd shown earlier was gone, replaced by an expression Stiles couldn't quite read. "You didn't have to come after me."

Stiles stared at him. "Wait, you think it would have been okay if we'd just _left_ you there?"

"I know I'm not…" Derek huffed out an exasperated breath. If this were anyone else, Stiles would have said that the look on Derek's face was uncertain, anxious. "But you spent your vacation helping me anyway, and you invited me along to eat with you guys and then you came after me. That's a lot."

Stiles stared at him some more. "You," Stiles said, enunciating his words slowly and with exquisite care, because it was really important that Derek know he was totally truthful here, "have a lot of issues." Because holy crap, Derek thought that he had to apologise for Stiles spending some time with him, for Stiles inviting him along to eat some fucking _waffles_ , in the same breath that he'd thanked Stiles for saving his life. Those were not equivalent things, no matter how good the waffles were. "I mean… I just…" Stiles' hands were going, trying to give shape and heft to his thoughts which were a churning jumble that was already far beyond words. "Is it not possible for you to ever just respond to an emotion in the way that regular humans do? Just for once?"

Derek's jaw tightened. "Just this once?"

" _Yes_ ," Stiles all but shouted. "Because I—"

And then Derek kissed him. Holy shit, Derek Hale was _kissing_ him, and Stiles felt his breath hitch and catch because there was stubble, and surprisingly soft lips, and Stiles had absolutely no idea what was going on here so he just made a command decision to go with it. Derek was kissing him and Stiles was surprisingly okay with it even though this was _Derek_ , who would _never_ , and holy crap, maybe there was still some mind control mirror mojo at work here. 

Stiles pushed him away. "Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on a minute here," he said, before pulling Derek back close and inspecting his arms, his cheeks, pulling one eye wide open and peering at it before Derek smacked his hand away. "Are you still all mind-whammied? Is this a mirror thing? Because if it's a mirror thing—"

Derek looked mulish. "You came and got me."

Stiles beat his head gently against the steering wheel for a moment, until he'd recovered the ability to respond in a quasi-rational manner. "So did Lydia, and I didn't notice you mashing your face against hers! I just asked you to—" He froze because wait, wait, he'd asked that third question of the scary goddess lady—he'd asked her what Derek was going to need and she'd said that he needed loyalty, proof that someone was as loyal to him as he was to them, needed someone to give him the opening to say something that he'd never just offer up himself. "Oh my god."

"I should go," Derek said, making to open the jeep's door, but Stiles launched himself across the seats, almost impaling himself on the gear stick, and hauled Derek back in.

"No," Stiles said, "no, no, okay, because you really need to explain to me for serious why me and not Lydia. Why me?" Stiles said softly, and like this he was really, really close to Derek, and the heat of his body, and the pale watchfulness of his eyes.

"Because you've been coming to get me for a while now," Derek said, speaking through gritted teeth. "And I like you."

Stiles blinked. "Dude. You— _dude_. You like me? You _like_ me like me? Why didn't you just _say_ something?" Because maybe this wasn't something Stiles had really ever actively considered… well, admittedly he had checked out Derek's ass a time or ten because hello, Derek's ass, Stiles was only human, but he'd never thought about what it would be like if Derek was watching him in return. Except… he stopped and blinked and thought back over the past day, the past several months, about how there'd been a time when he'd been willing to abandon a dying Derek at the side of the road but he'd spent the morning tracking the guy down through, like, some other dimension or some shit because, because… Huh. Now that Stiles thought about it, especially when said thinking was occurring plastered right up against Derek's broad chest, the possibility of him having feelings for Derek was something that he should consider. Should consider a lot. With tongues. 

"I did say something! Just now!" Derek said, scowling, like that was a winning rhetorical argument, and the fact that Stiles found that sort of hilarious and endearing instead of just plain ridiculous probably meant that Stiles should kiss him. So he did—licked his way into Derek's mouth, hummed in satisfaction when Derek reached up and cradled the back of Stiles' head in one big hand, fingers burying themselves in Stiles' hair in a way that made Stiles shiver. Derek's kisses were focused, fervent—when Stiles had to pull away after a while in order to catch his breath, Derek growled softly; when Stiles tilted his head back, offering Derek his throat, Derek whined and buried his face against Stiles' neck. Stiles could hear Derek smelling him, taking in great deep breaths, and nosing at the sensitive skin behind Stiles' ear. It should have felt strange but Stiles was more turned on than he could ever remember being.

By the time they finally broke apart, Stiles was pretty sure that he was working on a fierce case of beard burn, knew without a doubt that his eyes were heavy-lidded, and that Derek was looking at him with an expression which promised that Stiles was going to get his thoroughly debauched Spring Break after all.

"Our foreplay is really weird," Stiles said as they clambered out of the jeep, Stiles barely pausing to slam the door behind him before Derek took Stiles' hand in his and started towing him towards the house.

"So are we," Derek said, which, point. 

"But, you know," Stiles continued, because he just couldn't help himself, it was a thing, "this wasn't the most romantic way we could have started to—"

Derek came to a sudden halt, wrapped his arms around Stiles' waist and looked at him very seriously. Holy crap, he was good looking. Would he think it was weird if Stiles wrote an ode to his cheekbones? Because if ever a guy deserved an ode to his cheekbones… "Stiles."

"Shutting up now," Stiles said promptly, because why focus on all the things that might be wrong when he could be focusing on the things that were right—that he and Lydia had worked to bring Derek back to them; that Derek cared; that Derek's mouth was hot against his while all around them the woods were slowly stirring into new life.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is an amalgam of a couple of different elements plucked at random out of Irish and Norse myth. The questions asked of Stiles and Lydia, and some of the other dialogue of the heads, come from the _Poetic Edda_ ; the woman they talk to is the Morrígan in her guise as the washer at the ford. The heads on the tree come from my memory of a primary school visit to Celtworld. (Yes, there was once an educational theme park for kids in Ireland which included talking, animatronic severed heads on a tree. Ah, my country.) The triple goddess at the end is an Irish spin on the Erinyes. The title and the mirror itself are filched from _The Snow Queen_.


End file.
